Vikings returned to the site of their earliest known base in Ireland last weekend and the town made a decent stab at a festival in their honour, writes ROSITA BOLAND
DID YOU KNOW that the earliest record of a permanent Viking base in Ireland was at the little seaside village of Annagassan, Co Louth, in 841? No, me either.
Fast forward 1,170 years, and this piece of history is now the basis for Annagassan’s Viking Festival, which was held last weekend.
Although the festival began on Friday, in a typically Irish way it wasn’t officially opened until 6pm on Saturday, not long before the whole thing was due to end. The local village green was the location for the festival’s activities, the focus of which were the “Vikings”, some from Ireland and others imported from Denmark for the occasion. On Saturday, some 20 men and women in linens, rustic wool, and mink-trimmed capes clanked round the wet field with swords, wooden shields, and so much silver jewellery they could have opened a stall. In fact, some of the visiting Vikings, such as Danes Henrik and Elisabeth Grundtmann, did indeed have jewellery stalls.
There were some battle re-enactments with visiting Vikings and local children in 21st century wellies, who swiftly picked up the art of wielding shields. There were no language barriers: the vocabulary of the blood-curdling yell is an international one. At another location, people were invited to try on helmets and examine weaponry. At various places around the field, Vikings were cooking on cauldrons, carving wood, and tending to wolfhounds. There was storytelling for children aboard a longship reproduction boat, unfortunately located next to a throbbing generator that added an extra backing track to the event.
All of the Danish visitors work as re-enactors in an outdoor theatre in Frederikssund each summer, in a Viking-themed show that incorporates some 250 actors. One of them is Niklas Noe-Nygaard (23). “I have been acting like a Viking for 23 years,” he confided. This reporter was flummoxed. It transpired Noe-Nygaard’s parents were also re-enactors at Frederikssund, and from the age of three weeks, he appeared in the show, wrapped in skins as a Viking baby. His task in Louth was to re-enact the part of a Viking who wished to “rip off the clothes of a Viking woman”. He did actually rip apart Sabrina Jill Jensen’s clothing, who later disclosed the Velcro strips that ran up and down the seams of her long woollen dress. “I made it myself.”
Noe-Nygaard, Jensen and Karsten Nielsen were drinking Tuborg in between their re-enactment appearances.
“Because it’s Danish,” Jensen explained.
“No, because it was the cheapest one we could find,” corrected Noe-Nygaard.
After the local children had had their turn in the ring fighting the invaders, the invaders fought each other most convincingly in further re-enactment scenes. Check-in at the airport back home must have been interesting: each Viking had a large steel sword that certainly wouldn’t fit into a weekend bag.
The original Vikings arrived to Annagassan by longship. If the Viking visitors wished to find alternative methods of travelling back to Dublin Airport, they had a choice of five vintage vehicles. There were four vintage cars on display in a corner of the field, alongside a magnificent old red Massey Ferguson tractor.
Should actual real modern invaders be tempted to plunder Annagassan, they have a secret weapon in the form of local man Sean Geeney, who was MC for the weekend, and whose astonishingly loud voice was quite possibly heard as far away as Donegal. Nobody is sneaking unnoticed into the village while he has a spirited voice in throat and a microphone in hand. In between his enthusiastic commentary, the tannoy belted out The Fields of Athenry and other Irish ballads.
Some of the stalls were a little less Viking-themed than others, such as those offering Mediterranean nuts, Turkish baklava, Greek olives, Italian pasta sauces, pesto, olive oil, lemon curd and hummus. The hog roast stall, with an ever-diminishing pig on a spit, had both Vikings and locals queuing up to purchase hog rolls. Being a community event in a small village, many local activities were represented, most of them in a marquee. Joan Mulroy, Margaret Corrigan, Marian Mulroy and Margaret O’Neill were presiding over a stall of tea-cosies, toys and tiny cardigans, made by members of Annagassan’s knitting club. Mulroy herself had knitted a magnificent Viking longship, complete with sails. “Ah no, that one’s not for sale.”
There were also quaintly old-fashioned attractions of the kind we used to have a millennium ago when Vikings were still knocking around. These included Guess the Name of the doll in her hand-knitted dress, to win said doll, and Guess how many hard-boiled sweets in the jar. The prize for guessing the number of sweets? The jar, of course. And possibly a gift token for the dentist.
See Alan Betson’s Audio Slideshow on the Annagassan Viking Festival at irishtimes. com
